Nobody is laughing at Big Ten now

Joe Walljasper

Sunday

Apr 25, 2010 at 12:01 AMApr 25, 2010 at 7:00 AM

In recent years, sports fans outside the Upper Midwest have had their fun with the Big Ten Conference, mocking the league for its plodding football and basketball teams, groaning at the thought of a BCS National Championship Game involving Ohio State and taking perverse delight in the collapse of a proud Michigan football program.

The league took a backseat to the SEC and Big 12 in football and the ACC, Big East and Big 12 in basketball.

The image of the Big Ten was as uptight as Jim Tressel’s sweater vest and as outdated as Joe Paterno’s Coke-bottle glasses and high-water pants. But the guy running the show, Commissioner Jim Delany, wasn’t living in the past. He was busy outthinking his counterparts around the nation. By seeing the possibilities of the Big Ten Network as an enormous revenue-generator, he positioned his conference as the most desirable club in college athletics.

And with one news release in December announcing that the Big Ten was considering expansion, he sent conference officials and athletic directors nationwide into scramble mode. Now, Delany and the Big Ten expansion committee are deciding whether to do nothing, to merely tweak the college athletic landscape (by adding one school) or to set off a massive chain reaction (by adding five or more).

Delany seems to be enjoying his moment. An unusually high number of reporters flocked to the Bowl Championship Series meetings last week in Scottsdale, Ariz. It must have been awkward for other commissioners to share a conference room with the man who might destroy them. Delany emerged from his self-imposed “silent phase” but revealed little other than saying that decisions won’t be made until at least December.

What’s the hurry, when every day the sports pages and airwaves are filled with news about which schools might be lucky enough to join your wonderful league?

On the face, the Big Ten’s decision seems like a math problem that could be figured out in a matter of minutes, not months. Identify nearby universities that meet your academic standards, then determine how many new customers those schools would bring to the Big Ten Network.

As CBS Sportsline’s Dennis Dodd pointed out in an excellent series on the expansion issue, Missouri would offer about 2.2 million households, almost all of which would wind up with the Big Ten Network on their cable or satellite systems. The Big Ten gets 70 cents a month per subscriber within the conference’s footprint. So, 70 cents x 12 months x 2.2 million homes = $18,480,000. That’s how much the conference would make per year from the Big Ten Network alone if Missouri were to join the league.

Whether that, along with the school’s academic credentials, is enough to merit an invite is the question that will linger until the holidays, but I believe Missouri would be more than happy to join the club if asked. It would be foolish to refuse the offer.

The foremost athletic reason Missouri is interested — from the governor on down — is because Big Ten members currently get about $21 million per year in football revenue. MU got $9 million in football revenue from the Big 12 last year.

The Big 12 is locked in to its primary TV contract with ESPN/ABC for five more years, so it is essentially helpless to fend off the Big Ten’s advances, as is the other likely candidate to be cherry-picked, the Big East.

Most notable to me is how little opposition I’ve heard from Missouri fans to the idea of the Tigers switching leagues. There are certainly drawbacks. The annual home basketball game with Kansas — the only reason some fans buy season tickets — would become an every-other-year affair. Rivalries with the likes of Iowa State and Nebraska, which date back more than a century, would wither. Football recruiting in the state of Texas might suffer.

But frustration with the Big 12 and the potential of Big Ten riches override those points. The lack of equal revenue sharing and the annual bowl snubs — particularly in 2007, when a lesser Kansas team was allowed to leapfrog Missouri for a bid to the Orange Bowl — are seen as signs that the Big 12 leadership isn’t assertive enough.

Assertiveness is not a problem for Delany. He had the foresight to make his league the envy of all others — financially if not competitively. Nobody’s laughing now.

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